With the amount of publicity in old guard mainstream media (late night talk shows, old line newspapers), you’d think that Twitter was the best thing since sliced bread, which leaves some wondering if the death knell has been sounded for bloggers.

Take a look at the signs of the impending apocalypse, once proud A-Lister bloggerati have taken a hiatus, stopped blogging, or are pummelled over the twitterstream into irrelevance. Is blogging, once the circa 2006 golden boy of mainstream media, now it’s whipping boy?

More importantly, is anyone going to read more than the 140 character limit imposed by micro blogging platforms like Twitter?

Are we destined to become a SMS/text nation?

Gee… I hope not.

But anecdotal evidence shows that bloggers are updating their Blogger and WordPress blogs left often, meanwhile they’ve racked up hundreds, if not thousands of twitter updates within the space of a few month.

From casual observation, the mantra seems to have shifted from “I’m blogging this” to “I’m tweeting this”.

It’s a valid observation too. If you’re busy talk-tweeting for an hour every day, that’s an hour taken away from think and composing your next blog post.

The paradigm shift might be this: From an isolated position of having to plan and write a blog post in isolation and interacting with readers through the blog comments later, it’s shifted to a model of firing a question into the twittersphere and using a combination of @username and direct message responses to have a real time chat – Twitter is kind of like the bastard child of IRC and forum discussions in my opinion.

I believe blogs and twitters can and will continue to co-exist. There’s only so much that can be said in 140 characters. The modus operandi involves including a URL together with the short, pithy update. And blogs more than adequate fill that space.

If anything, twitter has replaced email marketing as a traffic channelling mechanism, and blog traffic has been picking up.

Not to mention having made a couple hundred more blog friends through the enabling technology of Twitter.

Believe or not, 140 character tweets will likely sit side-by-side with 400 word blog posts for some time to come.

I doubt blogging will go away. While many people have started to feed a full blown twitter addiction, most of the meaningful convo on twitter typically points to…..blogs or news stories. Without places to link to, twitter would be far less entertaining.

Plus, you have to realize that only a small fraction of people actually lose twitter and I have found that the small fraction of my local friends that do use twitter (and aren’t geeks) don’t really tweet in the same way that us geeks do.

Finally, a lot of information on blogs that are “how-to” or breaking stories will still get traffic via organic search.

Will it thin out the blogging ranks? God, I hope so. But I doubt that twitter will pummel “blogs”.

Hopefully the Twitter craze will settle down soon. I think blogging and forums have taken a knock from the move into Twitter but once it’s no longer the “new” thing, I think we’ll see things settle into a healthy balance. At least I hope so. I’m not a big fan of Twitter myself. While I do use it occasionally, mostly I find it too distracting.

Oh no! I hope that we donâ€™t become a text nation Andrew! Twitter is an upgraded text message with a marketing twist. There will always be people that find a deeper meaning in communicating more than just one line with their audience to share an idea.

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About Me

Hi, I’m Andrew Wee, an Asia-based internet marketer.I’ve been involved in the online world since 1997, having worked at one of Asia’s first content portals and helping to develop and project manage several content sites focused on verticals such as news, stocks, mutual funds and consumer/entertainment.Continue reading here